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Thursday, June 10, 2010

MDeC: ICT imprint pervasive in 10MP blueprint

KUALA LUMPUR The Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) sees the imprint of information, communications and TECHNOLOGY [] (ICT) across the entire blueprint of the 10th Malaysia Plan (10MP) that was unveiled by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak on Thursday, June 10.

"The 10th Malaysia plan clearly articulates the central role of ICT as a bedrock for the nation to vault forward towards a truly high-value economy.

"The quantum leap in the plan is how much more the ICT sector will see its role expanded from being merely a vertical to include the horizontal as well, as it cuts across all spheres of the national economy and Malaysian quality of life," said MDeC CEO By Datuk Badlisham Ghazali in a statement on Thursday.

He said this was clearly demonstrated given the fact that ICT was selected as one of the 12 national key economic areas (NKEAs). "It is important to note that Malaysia's ICT industry, encompassing the hardware, software, services and telecommunications clusters, accounted for about 9.8% of the nation's total gross domestic product (GDP) in 2009," he said.

Badlisham said one area in which MDeC would take a leading role was in cloud computing, which would enable SMEs to move from a capex to opex operations giving them speed, agility and huge cost savings. "In this sense, ICT becomes a utility similar to electricity or water," he added.

"Pervasive adoption of ICT across all sectors of the economy can lead to greater productivity growth and GDP contribution. Studies in Europe and the US show ICT contributing 50% and 63% respectively to the total factor productivity (TFP) growth of these regions," Badlisham said.